Dough, as used in a known machine for producing bread, confectionery, or the like, often takes the form of a continuous strip. In a process for forming the continuous dough strip and for dividing the strip into smaller portions to produce food products, a production lot in one cycle of the process is a continuous dough strip of a certain length or a number of products produced from a dough mass supplied in one cycle.
In the border between a preceding and a following supplied dough mass there are various and unavoidable losses, e.g., the loss caused by a border of an irregular shape and the loss caused by the waiting time for the following dough mass, etc., which generate various disadvantages.
Such disadvantages have led to the use of a method and apparatus exemplified in Japanese Patent Early-Publication No. 63-245631 (corresponding to U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,883,417 and 4,902,524, issued to Morikawa et al.), assigned to the same assignee of the present application, in which a long dough mass is divided into a plurality of dough portions, which are then caused to overlap and join in series to form a continuous dough strip.
The disadvantage of such prior art, however, is that a border between the preceding long dough mass and the following long dough mass cannot be properly joined. The border often has a narrow width or uneven thickness or both as compared to the remainder of the dough strip. Thus, the border tends to generate the losses, and this has been a problem in producing a continuous dough strip.
It is thus necessary to design a process, and to construct an apparatus which, when forming a continuous dough strip by joining a plurality of dough portions, will provide means for smoothly and properly joining dough portions and for forming a continuous dough strip with a substantially constant width.